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The Cyprian Goddess

Introduction

In the 1930s Bantock undertook examining tours overseas for Trinity College of Music and it was while on one of these that he wrote the The Cyprian Goddess, his third symphony, which he subtitled ‘Aphrodite in Cyprus’. Written while crossing the Pacific, the manuscript full score is dated ‘12 January 1939 Pacific Ocean. Suva (Fiji)’.

Bantock’s love affair with languages led him to study not only Latin and Greek, but also Persian. The Pagan Symphony had taken its cue from the second book of Horace’s Odes, and the opening of Ode XIX concerning Bacchus. Aphrodite is, of course, the Goddess of Love, whom he had invoked so memorably before in the Sappho Songs for contralto and orchestra. Now in The Cyprian Goddess he prefaces the score with the two Latin verses of Ode XXX in the first book, as well as a photograph of the statue of the Venus de Milo from the Louvre.

Venus, queen of Knidos and Paphos, quit thy favoured Cyprus and come to the fine temple of Glycera which calls you with much incense.

Let the passionate child, the Graces with their girdles untied, the nymphs, Youth, all the less attractive without you, and Mercury hasten with you.

The music plays continuously, but consists of a variety of contrasting sections, and the feeling of a story or succession of images is striking. Why Bantock was never commissioned to compose for the films when he writes so cinematographically is a mystery. Bantock gives us no detailed programme, but from time to time he writes a classical quotation (in English translation) above the score, thus indicating the major milestones, and effectively marking four movements, each of several sections. The first five minutes of the music can thus be regarded as an extended prelude, setting the scene, in which recurring motifs are introduced.

The first quotation (track 2) is from Theocritus: ‘Ay, but she too came, the sweetly smiling Cypris, craftily smiling she came, yet keeping her heavy anger’. Bantock marks the music liberamente and launches a long lyrical passage taken by violins in octaves; this rises to a climax, like waves breaking on a rock, and then falls quiet again. Now follows a quotation from the Smyrna Pastoral poet Bion: ‘Mild Goddess, in Cypris born—why art thou thus vexed with mortals and immortals?’ (track 3). Bantock’s marking is animando, and the texture of repeated quavers in the strings reminds us of his friend Sibelius. This is sea-music in the tradition of his earlier Hebridean Symphony and leads to a passage of repeated fanfaring trumpets reminiscent of the climax of that work. Eventually the storm subsides and quiet music leads to a violin solo launching the third section.

As the solo violin plays above a hushed accompaniment of muted strings (track 4) we have another quotation from Bion: ‘Great Cypris stood beside me while still I slumbered’. The tempo marking is lentamente; Bantock’s dream is of romance and the exotic as he soon presents a wide-spanning string tune and then contrasts it with oriental dances at first delicate, then much wilder. The opening cello and double-bass motif returns on clarinet and Bantock launches into glowing and triumphant orchestral love music and his fourth quotation, from Bion’s pupil Moschus: ‘His prize is the kiss of Cypris, but if thou bringest Love, not the bare kiss, O stranger, but yet more shalt thou win’ (track 5). The end is happy and affirmative, the material from the opening returns, no longer questioning but heroic and confident, and eventually with a quiet sunset epilogue Bantock’s vision fades from sight.

This may have been a strange work to have written at the turn of 1938/9, yet Bantock’s dream of Aphrodite and of a happier time is vivid and gripping, as Scheherazade-like he evokes an antique world. It is now almost a cliché to refer to the Freudian imagery of the sea, yet it is surely no accident that as the seventy-year-old composer’s thoughts are of love and his earlier life, he finds his most compelling metaphor in thrilling sea music. As his liner crosses the Pacific the final sunset glow is for the moment without any hint of the war and the horrors so soon to come.

Recordings

'Bantock's prodigious output as a composer … rested in the long grass for decades until Vernon Handley's Hyperion recordings revealed the many qu ...'What an achievement! Twenty-one late-romantic orchestral works in one box at mid-price or better. Bantock's lavish romanticism is superbly served by ...» More

'Outstanding. A sumptuous wallow for all unashamed Romantics … full marks, Hyperion—now we can all wallow once more. Worth the price for the sump ...'Just as good as its predecessors. Roundly recommended' (Fanfare, USA)» More